The title of this post is one of the most significant lines of David, one of the main characters in Prometheus and it’s perhaps the best way to describe Ridley Scott’s latest sci-fi movie.
First, let me get just one thing out-of-the-way. Prometheus is a great movie, one of the best sci-fi movies of the last 10 years, but it’s not supposed to be an Alien prequel, so for the critics out there that insist in comparing Prometheus with Alien and saying that it’s bad, FUCK YOU. Alien is one of the best exercises in fear and suspense, an excellent movie, so good that no other Alien movie (2,3 and 3) can live up to it, and those were supposed to be better. Prometheus is a whole new beast, it’s an action sci-fi movie that shares the Alien movies DNA and answers some of the questions raised 33 years ago, but it raises new ones, a lot of them, many beyond everything we learned about this universe in the Alien movies.
With this out-of-the-way, let me start my short review, hopefully without spoilers.
Let me start with the 3D. I’m not a very big fan of 3D movies, and when possible, I watch the 2D versions. Prometheus is the best 3D movie I’ve ever seen. The 3D usage has been meticulously thought, it works great and serves its purpose. It’s also the first 3D movie that didn’t give me a headache, that’s supposed to mean something. It’s a polished movie, the photography is amazing, the effects are sublime, very well done, almost an exercise in design, with each an every one of them serving their purpose. The days of the walls with blinking led lights are long gone, now every led, screen or hologram is there for a valid reason, so real that makes you believe it’s true. The creatures are amazing, we get to see more that we hoped for, everything done in a seamless way. Ridley Scott’s formula of real sets with CGI works ten thousand times better that the green screen shit other directors do. This only proves that RS knows what he’s doing from the beginning of the movie to the end.
The cast is good, but even with great names like Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce, it’s Michael Fassbender’s David that steals the show. David is a roller coaster ride of personalities. In a minute he’s a curious child exploring an alien world like it was a toy shop, in another he’s a calculating and mischievous bastard with the face of Peter O’Toole. David, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) are the strongest characters in the movie, all the others are there to enhance the plot or are “cannon fodder”, and that it’s perhaps Prometheus biggest flaw, the personality traits of the stereotyped movie characters, but even that doesn’t spoil the amazing story Ridley Scott tells us. There are a lot of topics covered in Prometheus. Life, death, religion, faith, humanity, all in a mixed bag of emotions that leaves a lot of room for at least two more movies, which I really hope RS makes them. The story is so good that you won’t want to leave the theater in the end waiting for more.
To finish, if you want to see this movie, leave your “Alien” baggage out the door, it will be more interesting that way because each nod, each piece of information related to the Alien universe you get to see in this movie, will be a better surprise. You can “connect the dots” later on when you arrive home and watch Alien, only to find that your memory of the movie was “sugar-coating” it a lot more that you were expecting it to be.
Prometheus can be, indeed, the small beginning for on of the biggest trilogies the sci-fi genre will ever have.
